Emily Witt: The Peculiar Genius of Björk

The albums and their stories map the bifurcation of Björk’s artistry. There is Björk the musician, who creates her music in an emotional cocoon, tinkering with technologies, concepts and feelings; and Björk the producer and curator, who seeks out collaborators to help her translate her work beyond sound, who has an unparalleled ability to disperse herself across a vast range of media. In the popular imagination, it is the latter vision of Björk that spectacularly dominates: Björk who has a gorilla for a dentist; Bjork in a pearly dress that she pierces into her skin; Björk wearing a mask of spines. But it should be known that by the time these visions of Björk reach us, even as they seem like dispatches from the future, they are snakeskins that Björk has already shed. They are the stories that have coalesced, while she has continued on into the protean, the experimental and the unsung.